Charlotte Ashley – Book seller, collector, writer, editor, historian

May 31, 2010

Moving the Goal Posts

Don’t you hate it when you spend seven years on a manuscript and then one day some Hollywood hack coughs out some summer blockbuster containing some superficially-similar concepts, and all of a sudden elements of your story that were carefully planned literary allusions make the whole work look like fan fiction? And you could change those story elements, but then you lose the literary allusion and a lot of flavour that goes with it, and anyway YOU WERE THERE FIRST and THEY’RE the ones who should have to do a rewrite, right?